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brief career timeline: 1980s - silicon graphics / general magic 1990s - chief technologist, netscape early 2000s - CTO Tellme (speech recognition) late 2000
by swyx 11mo ago
brief career timeline:
1980s - silicon graphics / general magic
1990s - chief technologist, netscape
early 2000s - CTO Tellme (speech recognition)
late 2000s - CTO Metaweb (knowledge graph) -> acquired into Google
2010s - Google head of Machine Intelligence, Search, Gmail Smart Reply, etc, then took over Google Search and ML driven ranking (BERT)
2018 -> SVP ML/AI Apple to merge Siri/Core ML/all AI offerings under one roof
2023-2025 - led Apple Intelligence push
March 2025 - removed as head of Siri
Dec 2025 - retirement
would love to do an exit interview with him on the last 4 decades in building ai assistants!
-- https://x.com/markgurman/status/1995617560373706942?s=20 https://x.com/markgurman/status/1995617560373706942?s=20
cv of his successor Amar Subramanya - 16 years at GDM - head of eng for Gemini chatbot/training. joined microsoft in JULY this year.. and now poached to Apple. lmao.
- joezydeco 11mo agoI remember Tellme. They had an 800 number for free information via speech query but, of course, it was also for training ala 411GOOG. Fun times.
- next_xibalba 11mo agoI miss 411GOOG. It was fun and felt like a cool fusion of new and old tech.
- nostrademons 11mo agoIts purpose was to get training data for speech recognition. Once Google’s speech recognition was working reliably, there wasn’t much reason to offer the service got free.
- 1a527dd5 11mo agoThis might be my new favourite definition of "failing upwards".
- satvikpendem 11mo agoWhere did they fail besides Siri? The rest look like fine achievements to me.
- nostrademons 11mo agoNetscape was the market leading browser into the early 2000s, corresponding with JG leaving it. Never heard of Tellme, but it sounds impressive on a resume. Metaweb was a good open-source fact database which subsequently got walled off once Google bought it. Google Search works significantly worse now than it did under Amit, and I say that as both a user and a websearch Xoogler. (JG took over about a year after I left Google). Siri is the subject of this article.
- swyx 11mo agocan you substantiate "works significantly worse"? because obviously JG and whoever else worked on the BERT upgrade would disagree, but i am genuinely interested in contrarian takes.
- eurekin 11mo agoThis is quite a spectacular CV. Now I'm weighing more on the Apple side for not making it better.
- swyx 11mo agothe truth is ~none of us in the HN peanut gallery have any appreciation for what its like managing AI inside software inside Apple. it's less a technical role and more of an executive/politics/leadership role. im sure the disappointing progress shares a lot of blame and he was unfortunately the fall guy. estimated compensation $10-30m/yr for last 7 years tho...
- dhussoe 11mo agoThis is good context to add to the article, because he's basically at retirement age anyways. Depends a little on whether 1980s means "1980" or "1989" but with that resume I think he can afford retirement even if it's 1989 :)